Electricity cost tools

How many kWh does a house use?

Three answers, kept deliberately apart: a published national benchmark, your own bill converted into kWh, and a total built up from the loads you actually run.

How many kWh does a house use per month?

There is no single correct figure, and the three ways of answering are not interchangeable. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports 10,791 kWh per year — about 899 kWh a month — for electricity purchased per US residential utility customer in 2022; that is one country, one dataset, one year, and the same series spans 6,178 kWh in Hawaii to 14,774 kWh in Louisiana. Your bill answers a different question — money divided by an assumed rate — and a load list answers a third, covering only what you tick. For the default always-on load selection below, the bottom-up total is 107.7 kWh a month, a small fraction of any national figure, which is exactly the point: the gap between a benchmark, a bill and a load list is the most informative number on this page.

Layer 1 — Published benchmark

External observation · not a SnapEnergyLab model

These are published United States statistics for a specific dataset and reference year. They describe the American housing stock, not your home and not a global average. Two official figures already disagree, because they measure different things.

Source data held in benchmarks-1.0.0. Monthly values are the published annual figure divided by 12.
Figure	kWh / year	kWh / month	What it measures	Dataset and year
Electricity purchased per residential utility customer	10,791	899	Average annual electricity sold to (purchased by) a U.S. residential electric-utility customer in 2022. It measures metered purchases, so on-site solar generation consumed behind the meter is not counted.	EIA FAQ, based on Electric Power Annual utility sales data, 2022
Electricity consumed per household (survey-based)	10,500	875	Average site electricity consumption of a U.S. household, from the Residential Energy Consumption Survey. Excludes losses in electricity generation and delivery.	Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) 2020, as summarised in Energy Explained, 2020

Read the label before using the number

10,791 kWh/year ≈ 899 kWh/month is the 2022 U.S. Energy Information Administration figure for electricity purchased per residential utility customer in the United States. It is not a global "average home", not a current-year figure, and not a target. The same series puts Louisiana at 14,774 kWh/year and Hawaii at 6,178 kWh/year — a spread of 2.4× between two American states, before you leave the country at all. Outside the US, a home heated by gas or district heating, or one in a mild climate without air conditioning, can sit far below this line while being entirely ordinary.

Layer 2 — Your bill, converted to kWh

Estimate · only as good as your rate

This is about your household, but it is not a measurement: it is your money divided by a price you supply. Fixed charges, taxes and tiered or time-of-use pricing all sit between the bill total and the true unit rate, so the answer moves whenever the assumed rate is wrong. If your bill states kWh directly, use that instead — it is a meter reading, and this estimate cannot beat it.

Monthly bill total

Fixed charges on the bill

Standing charge, meter fee — anything you pay regardless of consumption.

Effective rate per kWh

Including taxes and delivery, not just the headline unit price.

766.7 kWh

estimated kWh per month from this bill

($150.00 − $12.00) ÷ 0.18 USD/kWh = 767 kWh/month · × 12 = 9,200 kWh/year

Why the three answers differ

Same household question, three different kinds of answer. Ranking them by size is meaningless until you know what each one counted.
Layer	kWh / month	kWh / year	Epistemic status	Fails when
1 · Published benchmark	899	10,791	Observed national statistic, U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2022	Your home is not an average US home: different climate, heating fuel, occupancy, size or country.
2 · Bill-derived estimate	767	9,200	Estimate from your money and an assumed price structure	The effective rate is wrong, tiers or time-of-use pricing apply, or fixed charges were not separated out.
3 · Bottom-up reconstruction	108	1,293	Scenario computed from a list you chose	Loads are missing from the list, or the hours and duty cycles do not match how the house is actually run.

What the gaps are telling you

The bill-derived figure is 767 kWh/month and the bottom-up list comes to 108 kWh/month, a difference of 659 kWh/month (86% of the bill-derived figure). The unexplained remainder is the useful part: it is energy the bill paid for that your list does not account for — typically heating, hot water, cooking, lighting, or a load running far more hours than assumed. Against the 2022 US benchmark of 899 kWh/month, your bill-derived figure is below it by 133 kWh/month — which is a comparison with one country's statistic, not a verdict.

Method

benchmark: published kWh/year ÷ 12 = kWh/month
bill: (bill total − fixed charges) ÷ rate = kWh/month
bill: kWh/month × 12 = kWh/year
bottom-up: average W ÷ 1000 × 24 h = kWh/day
bottom-up: kWh/day × 30.44 = kWh/month, × 365.24 = kWh/year

Assumptions

Benchmark values are stored verbatim in benchmarks-1.0.0 with publisher, dataset, reference year and definition. SnapEnergyLab does not adjust, inflate or blend them.
Bill conversion uses kWhFromBill() from the energy engine after fixed charges are subtracted; it assumes one single unit rate for all consumption.
The bottom-up load summary comes from batteryEngine-1.2.0, so this page and the backup, generator and watts tools cannot disagree about the same list.
An average month is 365.24 ÷ 12 = 30.44 days, so twelve average months are exactly one year.
The three layers are never averaged together or reconciled into one 'best' number.

What can change the result?

Heating and hot water fuel — an all-electric home and a gas-heated home are not on the same scale.
Climate and season: the same house can double its monthly kWh between spring and a heatwave or cold snap.
Occupancy, home working, house size and number of refrigeration appliances.
EV charging, which alone can add more than every small load in the house combined.
Tariff structure, which distorts the bill-derived layer far more than the other two.

Two official numbers that already disagree

U.S. Energy Information Administration publishes 10,791 kWh per year per residential utility customer for 2022, and roughly 10,500 kWh per household from the 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey. Neither is wrong. The first counts metered purchases, so a home with rooftop solar appears to consume less than it does; the second is survey-based site consumption for a different reference year and a different unit of observation — the household rather than the utility account.

That is why this page will not average them, and will not blend either of them with your own numbers. Two figures with different definitions do not become more accurate when combined; they only lose the labels that made them meaningful.

Which answer to use, and when

Use the benchmark only to ask "is my household unusual for this country?" — never to predict a bill. Use the bill-derived estimate when you have the bill total but not the kWh figure, and treat it as sensitive to the rate you typed: a 10% error in the effective rate is a 10% error in the answer, in the opposite direction. Use the bottom-up reconstruction to test explanations rather than to measure totals — it is the only layer that tells you which load is responsible.

If your bill states kWh directly, that number outranks all three. Every layer here exists because the meter reading is missing, not because it can be improved on.

How many kWh does a house use?